The Value of Authentic Leadership
Sarah Patterson, CMO of Samsara, shares valuable lessons learned at Salesforce that led her to achieve a career goal: taking a company public as CMO.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the Ojana.
I'm Dan D'Arcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by the one and only Sarah Patterson.
Sarah, how are you doing?
- I'm great, Dan.
I get to spend this time with you.
I'm very excited.
- I mean, I definitely am too.
So I wanna dive right into our first segment
called "Ojana Origins."
So thinking back, you know,
bring me back into the way back machine,
going back to 2008.
Tell me how you discovered Salesforce.
- So I actually, I discovered Salesforce in 2007.
I'm gonna go back even further.
I was in graduate school, I was getting my MBA,
and went to a job fair that we had on campus.
I was talking to all these different companies
and went up to this, you know, smaller booth
and started talking to this gentleman there
named Scott Holden, who'd gone to the same business school
I went to and started learning about Salesforce
and the CRM that they had built.
- I love that story because it feels like all roads
lead back to Scott Holden.
So I just love calling him out all the time.
But so give me the details though.
Like what was your first job at Salesforce?
Like who was your team, the size of the company at the time?
Your initial impression, like on the inside,
give our viewers and listeners, you know,
kind of a sneak peek into where Salesforce was
back in 2008.
- My first job I actually was coming in
and I was taking over doing SMB, product marketing,
taking over from Scott Holden,
who was moving into another job.
So right there, all roads lead right back to Scott.
But yes, so I took over and I built out our first microsite
for our small and mid-sized business customers,
worked on the customer references
and created all these different videos for that as well.
But I also have to say the interesting piece was
Al was my boss for September through December.
And then I was switched to Sean Whiteley.
So I very quickly within three months
had my second boss at the company.
- Yeah.
- That's what you get when you grow so fast.
- Exactly, well, and just for everyone out there,
obviously Sean Whiteley is the co-founder of Qualified.
So obviously you have a very long history with him and he,
I remember him telling me a story about you
where he gave you a challenge to create, you know,
what it was like 25 SMB videos
and you've really absolutely crushed it at that time.
I mean, anything else you wanna share about that?
- Oh yes, I think it was,
I think his challenge was go solve the problem of
basically our AEs spending a lot of time
answering the same questions.
There's gotta be a more efficient way, right?
For our customers as well as for our business.
And so that was where I started doing this digging around
and then brainstorming and seeing what, you know,
was out there in the world.
We were saying, "Hey, maybe we go and try creating
"some short video tutorials, right?
"To help our customers be able to self-serve."
'Cause in talking to customers too,
they didn't wanna have to wait to talk to a sales person
to get their question answered.
They wanted to know in the moment,
they wanted a quick answer.
And so yes, I surveyed our sales people.
I got the list of the top questions that they were answering.
And then I went and I scoped out and mapped out
the fastest way to do all of those tasks in Salesforce,
everything from creating a custom object
to creating a new contact, creating an account.
How do you set up, right?
And start to measure your pipeline as a sales person.
And I wrote out the scripts to show people how to do this.
And then I bought my own microphone
and I bought my own video editing software.
And the project took me a little while,
like I'm not gonna lie, that was a very arduous project
to enter into on my own, but the result was for almost,
you know, I don't even know how long,
five to eight years those videos were sitting out there.
I think Salesforce even changed the UI
and the videos were still out there
because they were getting so much play from our customers.
But that was that video project.
I think that earned me a lot of credibility
in the marketing org of wow, she learned the tool,
she knew what it was doing as a product marketer
and she knew how to clearly explain the value
to our customers as she was showing them
how to use the product.
- So I mean, look, I mean, you've had an incredible run
at Salesforce, you were there for 14 years.
And I really want you to brag here, you know,
just for a little bit because, you know,
you've been helping with launch products
like you were just talking about with SMB,
products like Chatter, work.com and the vaccine cloud,
which is more recently, but for a very, very long time,
you really helped build the service cloud
into the largest product line and what it is today.
So, I mean, what is the biggest success you've had
and like what are you most proud of at Salesforce?
- Oh, for my time at Salesforce.
So I would go back to building the service cloud team,
the service cloud as a brand at Salesforce.
That is one of my biggest successes in my career.
And I often tell people too, right,
that when you think about your career journey
and I truly believe this, there are some projects,
there are some things you're gonna remember,
but more often than not,
you're gonna remember the impact you had on people.
And I feel like I was really able to as a leader,
help people to develop their best marketing skills,
to be able to be a part of a team
that was solving some really tough challenges
and went through some really hard times,
but got to the other side of it
and helped those individuals to grow their careers
and have a big impact on the people's lives.
So I am really, you know, when I think back on my career,
I love the fact that I went into the service cloud world
and to take you back in time,
when I was approached about taking on this job,
Alex Bard approached me at my manager,
Fergus Griffin at the time, approached me about it.
And the product line wasn't doing well.
It had missed some internal targets
that had been set for it.
And the company was really looking for someone to come in
and do a turnaround situation for it,
like really infused some life and some excitement
back into this product line
and make it successful.
And so I was looking around going
and as a leader going into any new type of situation,
you should ask what are the resources
that are going to be there to set me up for success?
And I had a team of three product marketers and me
and I had half of a contractor to help with campaigns, right?
So 50% of a contractor's time to help on campaigns.
It was not a situation where I thought
it was really set up for success.
(laughs)
And that was a big discussion that I had
with them at the time of,
okay, this is gonna take a lot of work.
Is everybody going to be behind me?
Is everybody going to give me the time
to make the turnaround happen
and invest in the product line?
And they did, right?
To their credit sales force said, yes, we understand,
we need to invest in this, we will be behind you,
we will make those investments.
So coming in, Alex and I partnered,
we basically looked at how do we fix
the relationship with sales?
There was no relationship where the teams were talking
together and marketing and sales need to be joined at the hip
in order to make your pipeline number
and make sure that that pipeline is going to actually close.
You're driving in the right types of deals
to hit your ACV goals.
So I fixed the relationship with sales,
we repositioned the product into a broader platform play
and really talked about the success we had
in the world of customer service,
but leading off of our competitive differentiation
of being a platform and already having the sales cloud data
at your fingertips.
And then brought new life into the product line.
And a lot of this was a true partnership
with the product management team with Larry Robinson,
who's leading product there and was absolutely incredible
with Alex Bard as the GM and bringing in
some very forward looking products like SOS
where you could do a FaceTime call basically,
but allow the person who was providing you help
to see into the apps on your phone
and be able to help you with them.
So through that, we were able to really reignite
and get the momentum going behind this new product line
that the company had and continue that momentum
to help it become one of the largest product lines
sales sources had.
- That's great.
So just to replay back what I heard was,
with service cloud, it was the relationships you created
with sales to really make sure that the marketing
and sales were in check with the messaging
and how things were being positioned in the market,
your relationship with product management
and understanding where the latest innovations were coming.
And then of course product innovation,
such as like the SOS really coming through.
- Really showing customers you're gonna be there
in the future, right?
That's what they wanna know.
Are you gonna be the partner that's going to help us
get to the future?
- And your service cloud is helping bring them
into the future and because of that innovation,
you should come with the service cloud.
- Exactly.
- So Sarah, on the opposite side of the spectrum
at Salesforce, what would you say
your biggest lesson learned was?
- One of the biggest ones I would say is,
as I look back on myself as a leader,
being authentic and being vulnerable
and Bernay Brown actually is someone
that at Salesforce, the company had her come
and talk to different individuals,
talk to the entire company at a kickoff one year.
And the biggest lesson I learned from her
is that vulnerability and that authenticity
draws people closer and that's true courage, right?
And early in my career, I strove
for perfection all the time.
I put this very high bar out there for myself
of everything I needed to do.
I wanted to absolutely crush it.
But that's not always going to bring you your best work
and that's not always going to help your team
really feel like they can also achieve
what you are trying to do.
And I learned through my time at Salesforce
that when I was my most vulnerable,
that was when people really were able to say,
"Oh, Sarah's fallible too.
"Like she doesn't have all the answers.
"I'm gonna bring even better ideas
"because she's owning and admitting, right?
"That everybody here needs to contribute
"and it created a safe space for people
"to be able to talk about when they were struggling,
"which is a leader, you've gotta be able to be there
"for your team and help when things aren't going well."
That's one of the most valuable things a leader can do.
And it also just, it helped everybody
to bring their best self and really create
the sense of everybody banding together.
So if I could go back and give myself some advice
and if I could take a look at what I would want
to change about my career,
it's to own that vulnerability earlier,
that there is nothing wrong with that.
And that actually helps you to become
a better leader faster and helps other people
to bring their best work to work
and their best selves to work.
- I heard so much there.
I mean, bring your authentic self to work,
be vulnerable and courageous.
Also, done is better than perfect.
And my favorite was launch, launch and relaunch
or launch and iterate.
All of those things were great lessons
coming from Salesforce.
And this is a great transition into Ohana.
And obviously the title of this podcast
is Inside the Ohana.
And everyone talks about the Ohana
and they all describe it differently.
But I'm curious, how would you describe
what Ohana means to you?
- For me, Ohana is the fact that people
are coming together to help each other,
that they are.
And back to what I was just talking about
of being authentic, being vulnerable,
people are joining together to solve problems
and creating a safe space to do that
and really rallying behind each other
to get through those hard times
and then celebrating the wins, right?
And coming together to say,
let's celebrate your successes.
Even if it wasn't, it didn't turn out
how you thought it would at the beginning.
Let's all rally together and celebrate
what came out of that that is really great,
that was a good learning experience.
And that's what the Ohana piece meant to me
because growing a business, any business
and everybody in business knows this.
You're gonna hit those hard times, right?
You look at a company from the outside
and you can think, oh wow, they've never hit a hard time.
They never hit a road bump.
But that's not the truth.
You're going to hit those hard times in road bumps
and people's true selves come out in those moments.
And Ohana to me meant when we hit those hard times
and those road bumps, we rallied together.
It wasn't a blame game.
It was a, we've got a problem.
Let's dig down and figure out how we're gonna solve it
and fix it together.
- Before we get into our next segment,
are there any special stories or Ohana moments
that's a little behind the scenes that you wanna share?
(laughs)
- There are, that's a great question.
There's so many, but given we just saw a Super Bowl
and we just saw another sales first add in the Super Bowl,
I was having these flashbacks and talking about it
with some folks to Salesforce's first Super Bowl commercial.
And people may not realize it, but way back in the day,
Salesforce did another Super Bowl commercial
for the launch of a product called Shatter.com.
And this was a freemium version of the company's
business networking tool that allowed people
to collaborate on documents and share files.
And the company invested and worked with the Black Eyed Peas
who were that year's halftime show to create a commercial,
two part commercial that book ended the Super Bowl show.
And Will I Am wrote the Chatter Jingle and Song
and the company worked on that.
And I remember we were looking at that going,
Oh my gosh, we're gonna have so much traffic
coming into our website, it's gonna break the website.
What if that happens?
What if that was the experience
that potential customers had?
And so we went and set up all of these different war rooms.
I remember like to a T we were going through
what was going to happen at specific moments in time
when our failover process would be
to make sure that we didn't have servers go down,
that we had a good customer experience.
And I remember us all huddled, it was like 50 of us,
huddled in one of the office buildings
during the Super Bowl in a conference room,
making sure that we could keep the website up.
And the website didn't go down.
So it was either, you know, the team just absolutely
did their best job.
I think that's what I'm gonna chalk it up to,
making sure that we had a great experience
and all the failover problems were solved.
But yeah, that was one of the most interesting moments
and times and really it was through those really hard times
of solving those hard problems
that everybody felt truly bonded together
and did bond together.
- So let's get into our next segment, What's Cooking.
Sarah, obviously today you are the CMO of Samsara
and you just helped them go public
and huge congratulations by the way.
I want you to talk a little bit about
how you got to where you are now
and what your journey has been like
to get to your current role.
- So I feel absolutely thrilled
to have found a company like Samsara
and I've said this to a number of folks
that I joined Salesforce back when it was
a little under 2,000 people
and it was under a billion in, you know, ARR
and Samsara is at the same stage, right?
And there's so many similarities that I see about this company
to where Salesforce was back when I joined in 2008
and that was one of the things that really attracted me
to this opportunity when it popped up.
And through my time at Salesforce, I had been prepping.
I had this as a goal.
I'm always thinking of where am I going in my career?
What type of opportunity and challenge do I want to tackle next?
And being CMO of a company,
being able to take it public was a big goal
that I had for myself.
And I worked through Salesforce
and I always tell this for folks,
look for the job descriptions of the job you want to have next
and or even five years down the road
and think through what are the skills
that you need to add to your toolbell.
And that's what I was doing.
I was growing all of the skills
to be a well-rounded marketer,
knowing I'm not going to be able to go deep into every area
and be the expert in every area,
but know enough to be able to guide
and to be able to help grow the team in the right way.
And that's what I worked on.
Those are the experiences that I sought out at Salesforce.
And there was a benefit to,
and I said this at a recent Samsara event that we had,
there's a benefit to being on a FASCAR and company
and that's that growth.
Yes, there are different pains that come along with it,
but it creates all of this opportunity
for you as an individual to be able to raise your hand
and say, I'm interested in learning this new skill
and I see this as a problem we have as a company,
can I go over their boss and solve it, right?
And it creates opportunity for you to do that
and that's what I found through my time at Salesforce.
You brought up something that is something
I want to pull on a little bit more,
the thing between a product and a platform
and that was always a struggle at Salesforce as well.
Are we a product? Is it a platform?
Is it both like how do you position those things?
You know, how are you thinking about that at Samsara?
There are not a lot of companies that can go
and expand from having one really great point solution
to having multiple great point solutions.
And one of the ways that you can do this
and bring them together if you're lucky enough
to have that success, which Samsara has been lucky enough
to have that success, is you make one plus one equal three
by creating it into a platform solution.
By looking for areas where bringing the data
from those different point solutions together
creates more synergies for your end customers
and then ultimately their customers.
And that's the benefit that we are seeing
as we transition from that point solution
into being a platform play.
And it's really being able to make sure
your technology delivers on that for your customers.
And if your technology can deliver on that,
if they can see that value,
and you are able to help them solve other problems
by pulling all that data together,
go for the platform solution, right?
This is how you can have this exponential value
that you are creating for all of your customers
in solving their problems.
- Building on that, what challenges, you know,
additionally are you seeing at Samsara now?
And like, are you applying any of what you learned
at Salesforce to these challenges?
- There are a lot of similarities that I see
in terms of the challenges.
So one, it's this positioning,
like we just talked about from being a point solution
to talking about the value of a platform
and showing that value.
That was something that we had to solve at Salesforce
of painting that story for our customers
and showcasing that to them and then delivering on it.
And that's what we are going through here at Samsara.
There's also a piece of market education
about the change that we are driving at Samsara.
And that's another challenge that Salesforce also faced.
Salesforce was disrupting the way that companies
had looked at CRM in the past, right?
And disrupting the way that people were used
to accessing that information.
At Samsara, we're doing the same thing.
We are digitally transforming industries and companies
that haven't gone through that digital transformation.
We're helping them to have that digital transformation.
And we're educating on the value of our solution
in this world.
And those are very similar challenges.
And then there's the growth and scale.
Salesforce grew incredibly fast.
And there are a lot of scaling challenges
that you come across when you're looking at
how do you grow your teams?
How do you set up teams in the right way
to be able to sell the platform,
but also to be able to make sure each of these product lines
that the company has are producing the best results
for the customers that they can, right?
From the product side and that you're marketing that
successfully to the customers.
And those are other challenges that Samsara is going through
as we now have multiple product lines
that are delivering this value to our customers.
And we're positioning a platform.
How do we make sure that we set our teams up
for success in the right way,
build the right systems to help the company scale,
but also build the right change management methodologies
and build the right structures to help people
in the company be successful?
- You said something about building the right systems
to help you scale.
Obviously Salesforce is incredible with that.
How are you thinking about actually Salesforce
and is that part of your core strategy?
- We use Salesforce at Samsara.
So yes, it is, Salesforce is our database of record
for our customer information.
And that's how we look at making sure
that we've got all the right contacts in our database.
We're marketing to them in the right way.
We're expanding the way that we engage with them.
And Salesforce has been a core to helping us
to be able to do that.
- So what's next for you, Sarah?
And how are you shaping the future?
- On, we're actually planning our first ever
customer conference that we are going to have in the spring.
And I'm really excited about the customer stories
that we can bring to life there.
The impact that we can show that we have on the world
because one of the things that attracted me to Samsara is
our products have a tangible impact
on helping to solve real world problems.
So if we think about energy consumption,
71% of the US energy consumption is in this industrial world.
And there is a huge need to help the companies
in this world to be able to measure and track
what they are doing in terms of fuel consumption
in terms of miles driven on the road.
And then be able to take action on that
to see through benchmarking where they can cut down
on fuel usage, on CO2 emissions,
to have the sustainable impact on making sure
that we're leaving the world a better place.
And for me as a marketer to be able to bring those stories
to life is one of the things that is most exciting for me
because our products can actually help to leave the world
a better place.
And as a mom where I see my kids have smoke days
versus snow days, I wanna make sure that I'm doing my part
and I especially love that I can do that on my day job
to leave this world in a better place for them.
- I love that.
You said you're taking on your first customer conference.
That's a huge undertaking.
Like tell us a little bit more about that
and why don't you plug it?
I'd love to hear when and where is that.
- Thank you.
I was gonna get into that
if you weren't gonna open up the door for me.
So I love it.
Our first customer conference,
we are hosting it here in San Francisco.
And we are going to have it in June.
We are announcing this actually on our earnings call
that is coming up.
So people can also make a plug for that
so people can go and listen to our earnings call.
But we're gonna have it here in mid June
at the Intercontinental Hotel.
And it's gonna be exciting.
We're also going to virtually stream it
'cause we are living in this work from anywhere world.
And we wanna make sure that we can give people
if they don't want to come into San Francisco,
the opportunity to see where this world of operations
is heading and how we are helping
to really create the future of connected operations.
So you can tune in and watch our digital keynote
and it's gonna be an extraordinarily exciting event.
- Awesome.
So let's get into our final segment
called the future forecast.
So Sarah, what does the future of Salesforce look like?
I know you're still involved.
I know you still have a piece of your heart there.
Like, what do you think Salesforce is going?
- Yes, my husband, my better half works at Salesforce.
So still invested in that way.
I mean, Team Earth, who doesn't wanna get behind that?
I see Salesforce as, and as Mark says,
business is the biggest platform for change.
I see Salesforce as driving more and more
of these different policies for companies
and really helping to set an example
of where businesses need to go.
And then hopefully creating the technology
that will help everybody to be able to come together
and rally around those different initiatives.
So whether that is things around sustainability, right?
How can they create software to help people
be able to track more of what they are doing
in climate change, right?
- And reducing their footprint.
- There are a lot of marketers that listen to this podcast.
What advice would you have for an aspiring CMO?
Listening to this.
- My advice for an aspiring CMO,
one, always be learning.
I really value, and I love that CMO
or we have this as one of our core values,
adopting a growth mindset.
Like, always be okay with knowing
you're not going to know everything.
You're not going to be perfect in every situation.
And that is okay.
And always be willing to challenge
the old way of doing things, right?
Coming into SAMSARA, I was really impressed
with a lot of the different ways the team
had engaged with customers.
Things that like a very fast response time
to our customers that we would have loved to have had
when I was at Salesforce.
And I feel as a true competitive advantage for us
as a company.
And I would say always be willing to challenge your beliefs
and challenge what you know to keep growing and learning
and to think of new ways to do things.
- Before letting you go,
I want to have a little bit of fun
with a quick lightning round.
Are you ready for this?
So I'm just--
- I'm ready, oh my gosh.
- Just think of the thing that comes to your mind
and there's going to be no clarification on this.
Just go with it, okay?
(laughing)
- Just go, okay.
- Okay, yeah, favorite product.
- Oh, service cloud.
(laughing)
- Classic or lightning?
- Lightning.
- Favorite Salesforce character?
- Astro.
- Favorite commercial or ad of all time?
- I mean, chatter.com Super Bowl ad, it's timeless.
- Awesome.
Favorite brand of anything besides Salesforce?
- Besides Samsara too.
Vory Sweatpants right now for the work from home world.
- Secret skill not on the resume?
- Oh, so many secret skills.
I can draw little caricatures for my kids to color in
that are these really cute little animals
with very big eyes.
- Love it.
- Favorite city besides the one you live in?
- London.
- You just won front row seats to your dream event.
What is it?
- Oh, it is a U2 or Taylor Swift concert,
better yet, U2 and Taylor Swift.
- I mean, you know me, I love that answer,
so big T-swifty fan.
- All right, Sarah, this has been just so much fun.
Before I let you go, please let the listeners know
where they can find you and is there anything else
that you would like to share or anything to plug?
- Oh my gosh, so find me at Patterson_Sarah
on Twitter, you can find me on LinkedIn.
We are hiring at Samsara.
If you are looking for a career where your job
is going to have this real world impact,
to be able to leave the world in a better place,
come join us, we are the company for you to come and join.
- Thank you so much, Sarah, it was great to see you.
- Thanks, Sam.
(upbeat music)
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